This depends on which avenue you wish to participate within the VIVAconomy. Essentially there are two transactional functions employed for every Vivo: a stable recurring revenue stream (worker node) and a participatory share in a long-term financial asset (VIP retirement).

TradeQwik

The gateway to the VIVAconomy is TradeQwik, the custom-built exchange platform which uses blockchain technology. VIVA Crown and Coin are sold exclusively on TradeQwik.

This is where consumers, businesses, and professionals can exchange cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies for VIVA Coins, which is used as our vX instrument to exchange any of the tokens within the VIVAconomy.

From William Banks, CTO and VIVAconomy architect concerning security of your TradeQwik account:

“Our site is not really susceptible to DDoS anymore because we have multiple servers sitting behind HA Proxy, sitting behind Cloudflare. Each of our web-facing servers is a quad core, while the DB is postgres in multimaster mode with automatic failover.

We designed our systems to stay running in the event of a nation state actor deciding to attack, because script kiddies with an army of smart lightbulbs are the least of our concerns.”

Traveling Salesman Problem

In our whitepapers we stated that one VIVA Crown will be awarded once a week post ICO.

The issuance of this Crown will be awarded to the worker node that solves the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) for that week’s settlement between mints.

What exactly is the Traveling Salesman Problem?

The traveling salesman problem is a problem in graph theory requiring the most efficient Hamiltonian cycle a salesman can take through each of cities. No general method of solution is known, and the problem is NP-hard.

A problem is NP-hard if an algorithm for solving it can be translated into one for solving any NP-problem (nondeterministic polynomial time problem). NP-hard therefore means “at least as hard as any NP-problem” though it may, in fact, be harder.

The concept of Proof of Authority lies in how the different mints reach consensus. Actually writing the transactions within the VIVA network is a job that worker nodes will do.

PoW is a misnomer. In Bitcoin world, PoW is just a mechanism to control blockchain spam and we might not consider it real work. Yes, something occurred. It looks impressive, but the fact is that it really exists to regulate the rate at which blocks enter the network. Beyond that it serves no particular use.

By contrast, TSP is actual work. It provides settlement. Each mint is responsible for its own internal state, and consensus is achieved by proving the authority to perform a given transaction by presenting a certificate delegating said authority to you, which was signed by someone who had authority to give it to you.

Worker nodes tasked to the TSP seem like a Proof of Work system because it is computationally difficult, especially when you have many nodes. The fastest, most powerful nodes will solve the problems first and be awarded the weekly issued Crown.

The Traveling Salesman Problem can be solved by choosing random starting positions and working your way forward from there. The random aspect means there isn’t much difference between 1 core and 10,000 cores and who operates which node. You still need to solve and compare with the advantage of knowing all previous attempts with each subsequent attempt.

Theoretically it should be fairly random because the number of possible pathways is n factoral.

VIVA Crown

A VIVA Crown is often misinterpreted as a cryptocurrency. While this is technically true, VIVA Crown gives the owner a business license to run software which mints new VIVA Coins every 90 days. We call these businesses mints.

Please note that VIVA Holdings, Inc. is offering post ICO Crowns at specific price points and will never sell for less than what our Crown Holders have determined.

Interesting facts: The maximum amount of VIVA Crown ever to be in circulation is 42,000. 6,500 Crown were available for ICO A total of 10,500 Crown were minted for early adopters, bounties, merit, and ICO. Only one new Crown will be discovered each week by our worker nodes

Every transaction that occurs in the VIVAconomy generates a dividend that is partially returned to each and every Vivo based on their participation in the VIVA Investment Pool. This means the more you save, the greater the dividends that you will receive.

If you are a Crown Holder and have unused Treasury Rights, then a VIVA Coin equivalent to the TR allotment is credited to your VIP account every 90 days. If you are not a Crown Holder, Vivos may purchase VIP exclusively on TradeQwik.

VIVAconomy

The VIVAconomy is the ecosystem around VIVA Coin which makes the coin actually useful beyond a volatile speculative asset. It consists of VIVA Coins, VIVA Crowns which allow for the creation of new VIVA Coin, VIVA Treasure Rights (VTRs), which govern the amount of VIVA Coin which can be created in a given three month period, vX assets, which allow VIVA Coins to be spent wherever a nation’s legal tender can be spent, and the VIVA Investment Pool (VIP), an instrument that allows VIVAconomy participants, known as Vivos, to save up for retirement.

All of these tokens play different roles and work together to both power and bring balance to the VIVAconomy as well as allow Vivos to seamlessly live, work, and spend money both within the VIVAconomy and within their already established national and local economies.

The VIVAconomy also provides the infrastructure for a global peer-to-peer network to offer computing, storage and networking features. It is designed to evolve and offer additional services targeted to the financial, healthcare and manufacturing sectors as well as small business merchant processing services.

The strength of the VIVAconomy ecosystem depends on the efficiency of the entire system instead of the popularity of the coins.

The gateway to the VIVAconomy is TradeQwik, the custom-built exchange platform which uses blockchain technology. VIVA Crown and Coin are sold exclusively on TradeQwik.

This is where consumers, businesses, and professionals can exchange cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies for VIVA Coins, which is used as our vX instrument to exchange any of the tokens within the VIVAconomy.

Negative minting may sound quite counter-intuitive but it is one of the safeguards we’ve put into place to keep the VIVAconomy healthy.

How does negative minting work?

We have the ability to mint negative amounts of new coin and “suck a bunch of liquidity out of the market” if the price drops out of target range.

It is important to understand that the creation of vX destroys the VIVA underlaying it. Conversion from vX back to VIVA, which is required in order to move vX, results in the destruction of the vX and the creation of new VIVA.

In order to facilitate this, a mint must have enough Treasury Rights (TRs) to cover its obligations at all times.

Since a mint cannot incur debt itself, the debt of a mint is carried by the Crown Holders who sold their TRs to the mint. This debt is capped at 90 days.

A mint which fails to keep its books in order can be shut down by vote of the Crown Holders. If this happens the customers are moved to a new mint and the mint in debt is blocked from any further activity until its debt has been repaid by purchasing sufficient VIVA on the open market to cover its debt.

What if a mint cannot repay its debt?

In the situation where a mint cannot repay its debt it becomes deep frozen.

The network will not honor any contracts issued by the mint that require payment but will continue to process accounts receivable.

In the VIVAconomy there are gateways and there are mints. In most cases these will be the same business but they are defined as separate activities.

A gateway is responsible for a currency + method and a direction; in or out.

A mint is responsible for settlement between connected gateways, and for provisioning vX which are fungible market pegged instruments that are anonymous and basically untraceable; ecash as it were.

Furthermore a mint must have an “attached business activity” which can be anything except “selling VIVA”.

Mints hire worker nodes, the worker nodes do whatever the mint tells them to do, and the mint pays them in VIVA.

We use price as a signal to control production levels and there are a number of subtasks that are easily parallelizable and delegated, plus a worker node can just attach for “general compute” and run a docker node for the length of time required by its contract with the mint.

Often referred to as VIP, the VIVA Investment Pool is a single shared asset that each Vivo partially owns by contributing to the VIVAconomy. Your share in VIP accrues daily compounded interest. This asset can be switched to retirement mode, at which point it will pay out 24 VIVA Coins per day, or one coin per hour, until your VIP is empty or you switch it back to compounding mode.

Every transaction that occurs in the VIVAconomy generates a dividend that is partially returned to each and every Vivo based on their participation in the VIVA Investment Pool. This means the more you save, the greater the dividends that you will receive.

If you are a Crown Holder and have unused Treasury Rights, then a VIVA Coin equivalent to the TR allotment is credited to your VIP account every 90 days. If you are not a Crown Holder, Vivos may purchase VIP exclusively on TradeQwik.

Worker Nodes

There is a need for worker nodes at each of these levels, and the concept of worker node can mean a few different things.

Verification NodesThe first workers we need are transaction verification nodes. These simply verify that transactions in the channels for a specific mint are valid. I recommend that these particular nodes, be wholly owned by the mint, since they’re basically taking information from oracles and giving a thumbs up or thumbs down on it as soon as the data has passed through the ordering service.

Ordering ServiceThe ordering service is a system that does absolutely nothing other than timestamp incoming data. It does not validate it. It simply acknowledges receipt.

Transaction ProcessorsTransaction processors validate the incoming data and add it to the channel if it’s legitimate. Transaction processors are where we deploy what’s called “chain code”. This is the logic that says “Yes this data, whatever it may be, is valid for inclusion with this mint”.

What is an Oracle?An oracle is any service whose job is simply to provide a solid data feed to the network. An example would be something that watches another blockchain network and feeds the raw block data in.

In conclusionOracles and ordering services can handle multiple mints. Transaction processors are internal to the mint. From here the mint publishes streams composed of the various channels it elects to make public. These streams feed into the CAN where they become part of the permanent storage network. So we have a ton of blocks, and no specific chains, just links between data with the exception of the settlement chain, which summarizes mint to mint activity once a week, creating a new Crown in the process.

You will need a bare minimum of 30 mbps internet connection to keep up with the data per worker node.

Note: These are fairly low requirements however we expect weaker nodes will eventually be outcompeted by stronger nodes and may consolidate around larger data centers due to the profitability of a node and how it is directly tied to the cost of hardware and the cost of electricity to run the node.

What we have done here is to make it impossible to ASIC our coin and speed that process along. Our worker nodes require powerful CPU and a lot of disk space, which determines how many VCUs to sell per box. GPU is not generally accessible on docker.

100 GB of network in a month?

No. You are committing to providing up to that in an hour. Translated, it just means how much bandwidth the mint is allowed to utilize on your computer.

The 100 GB is a max cap on the number of bytes the network will push down onto that node; basically how many bytes you may have to pay for if you’re on a prepaid plan or have caps.

There will be a “VIVO” app for people to run on their computers. Depending on the task the worker node may take over your computer. You, as a worker node will not know what is specifically running. The mint will announce the payload, and, if relevant, what it does. You have the right to kill it at any time but will not be paid on that contract if you do so.

Some of these jobs are going to be compute and network intensive tasks. If you do not have a dedicated system, we recommend not using the computer while filling your contract order.

People are going to be paid based on their CPU, disk space and network speed. There are going to be people who cannot complete 1 VIVA Compute Unit (VCU). For these people, it is best to focus on the Content Addressable Network.

For reference: 1 VCU costs whatever the mint is willing to pay and whatever the workers are willing to accept. It is a negotiated contract.

The Traveling Salesman Problem can be solved by choosing random starting positions and working your way forward from there. The random aspect means there isn’t much difference between 1 core and 10,000 cores and who operates which node. You still need to solve and compare with the advantage of knowing all previous attempts with each subsequent attempt.

Theoretically it should be fairly random because the number of possible pathways is n factoral.

Docker is an open platform for developers and sys admins to build, ship, and run distributed applications, whether on laptops, data center VMs, or the cloud. A docker container is basically a virtual machine that can be used to run just about any software without affecting the rest of the computer

How does it work? Once you are setup in the VIVA network, your computer will signal that it is available to complete tasks. These tasks include retrieving data, storing data, and networking between computers.

On the VIVA network, our mints will announce a task that needs to be processed. The Vivo worker app will automatically determine the max VCUs you can reliably deliver. Once this happens you’ll be presented with a list of mints and what they focus on. You can select them all, or pick and choose. The Vivo worker app will then attach to mints based on highest offer per VCU and begin working.

It will be up to you to accept or reject that number if your computer is available.

The goal is that mints will rent compute resources from workers using our smart contract platform. The mint will be using the system to deploy docker containers to run anything that can be dockerized.

Once you enter into a contract, the mints can utilize your spare computing resources. You are then paid from the time the Vivo app detects the payload started until the contract ends. VIVA Coin payments will automatically deposit into your wallet.